02 July 2013

My mind hurts thinking about the instruction book you'd have to write for this one, but it is quite the nerdtastic feast! All hail builder Ryan McNaught, who built this for the University of Sydney using over 200,000 blocks! See more over at Gizmodo.

I
like to look at men … the way they look at women. There is no better
place than a museum to look at perfect bodies (or a stadium during
athletics competitions and football matches.)

I wanted to go back
to the birth of the representation of the human body perfection and it
happened during the Classical Greek period when sculptors’ skills
drastically increased and they took great care in their attention to
anatomical details. I could have worked with the penis but I preferred
focusing on these often neglected parts which secrete hormones, make and
store sperm...

For some male viewers,
exposing the most sensitive part of the male anatomy (although in rock
solid marble) to the gaze, trigger a sense of vulnerability which until
now was mainly reserved to the female body, an uncomfortable role
reversal.
There is also a hint of irony in Marbles, it could
suggest that a shift in masculine identity is happening and that the
splendour of the past erodes. I leave it to the viewer to decipher what
he/she wants to read in there and to take it seriously… or not.

About Archaeopop

Archaeopop is a blog by Daniel Shoup about archaeology and popular culture. I like the strange ways the past gets recycled into the present as art, economics, politics, and straight-up trash. I'm a researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy. Follow me on Twitter (@archaeopop) or get in touch at archaeopop@gmail.com.